Rick Strahl's Web Log

Spruce up your boring checkboxes and radio buttons with custom FontAwesome symbols using a little bit of CSS. If you're tired of boring checkboxes and radio buttons, or you simply want a more consistent look of these controls across browsers and controls check out FontAwesome to provide you with customizable checks and boxes to use for selection boxes. In this post I'll show how to use pure CSS to set up FontAwesome checkboxes and radios and talk about a few gotchas I ran into along the way.

Storing dates in persistent storage using UTC dates is a widely accepted best practice. But it's surprisingly complex using date data effectively if you want to let the user see dates and query data in their local time zone. Looking around I noticed that there's not a lot of comprehensive info on this topic, so I decided to take notes and write down some of the approaches I've used in this post. This post combines and overview and a number of helper routines specifically geared towards user timezone adjustments in typical ASP.NET Web applications.

vNext projects depend on NuGet packages to reference external dependencies. But vNext projects also support 'classic' .NET targets and the Full CLR vNext both of which support and even require assembly references in order to access core .NET functionality. In this short post I describe how you can reference external assemblies in non-vNext and FullClr vNext targets in vNext projects.

I've been struggling with performance when putting up an Azure virtual machine with the eventual intend to replace my physical server. In this post I describe some of the performance issues I've run into with Azure Virtual Machines in a simple scenario of migrating a single Web site to a full VM setup.

Ran into a nasty Visual Studio error today that caused a compiler error related to an errand assembly reference from Visual Studio Blend. Blend? I don't even use Blend, and this is a Web Project. Here's what the problem is and how to get around it with a temporary hack.

I'm finding myself using the command line more and more, especially with ASP.NET vNext for running Web apps from the command line, accessing git and JavaScript build tools. Here's a real easy way to pop open a Command Window in the active project directory from Visual Studio.

Apache Cordova is a hybrid mobile toolset to build Mobile applications using Web Technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Microsoft recently released a preview of its toolset for building Cordova applications with Visual Studio. In this article Rick takes a look at the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova for building, debugging and running iOS mobile applications from Windows by way of an example that takes an existing mobile Web AlbumViewer app and porting it to Cordova.

Ran into a nasty problem with an Android app install today and was unable to get the app to install on the device for debugging. Got an INSTALL_FAILED_VERSION_DOWNGRADE after a bunch of false starts it turns out this problem had an easy solution for me.

I've been running into a common issue with Entity Framework where using a dbContext through many context operations can drastically slow down Entity Framework performance. Here's a quick overview of the problem and how to work around it with a few minor tweaks.

When creating services it's often useful to return data from the $http service, or cached data that already exists. You can't however just return the cached data, but have to turn it into a promise so it matches the $http callback signature. Here's how to deal with this frequent scenario.

The ASP.NET vNext Platform makes it much easier to create multi-targeted NuGet packages, through support of multiple build targets from a single project and the ability to compile project output directly to a NuGet package.

Ran into an unexpected behavior when implementing an async version of WebClient to download data. While you can override WebClient to capture the HttpWebResponse object to capture additional Http information that is missing from the WebClient class, I initially had problems captureing the Respone on async requests. In this post I discuss a use case, problem and the simple solution.

The AngularJs $http object returns custom promises which can be surprising when you try to work with them. You can use either .then() or the easier .success() and .error() methods - at the cost of some inconsistency in Promise usage as these extension are specific to the $http functions. In this post I review a few different ways you can use promises and more importantly what the various $http methods return.

A few years back I wrote about a jquery-watch plugin I wrote that can monitor CSS property and Attribute changes and let you get notified if one of the monitored properties are changed. Unfortunately the plugin broke a while back as browser and jQuery dropped some older APIs. In this post I describe an update to the jquery-watch plugin using the newer and more widely supported MutationObserver API that brings high performance DOM node monitoring.

Process specific Performance Counters in .NET work directly only with Process Names, not Process Ids which can be problematic if you need to monitor performance of multiple instances of the same process. In this post I describe how you can capture multiple processes uniquely and monitor each individually.

.NET is a bit short when it comes to tools that can manipulate UrlEncoded data. If you need to read, create or modify raw querystrings or form data outside of ASP.NET's System.Web context there isn't a clean way to do this and even there if you want to modify url encoded data you'll need to write some code. This article describes a UrlEncodingParser class that lets you read in raw query strings, form data or entire URLs, then lets read, add and update values and then write the values back out. Makes you wonder why that functionality doesn't exist natively somewhere in .NET, eh? Code and samples are provided.

The Mobile Web has come a long way to provide the abillity to create rich UI and interactive, immersive and smooth Web based mobile applications. But there are still big gaps between mobile device features and what's available to Web developers when interacting with mobile devices. In this post I cover and contrast what's wrong with mobile Web development today and where I hope we are going, going forward.

If you have an application that needs to capture HTTP or monitor HTTP traffic, FiddlerCore is the tool you can use to do it easily. In this post I demonstrate how easy it is to integrate FiddlerCore into an application to capture HTTP requests and save the data, as well as discuss how to deal with configuring FiddlerCore for SSL Certificate installation for HTTPS captures.

Recently I had a need for a load testing tool and after quite a bit of frustration to find a decent reasonably priced load testing tool, ended up giving up searching and building one instead. In this post I introduce West Wind WebSurge, an easy to use Web load testing tool that makes it easy to stress test Web applications.

Project navigation in large projects can be a pain as you have to sift through large amounts of files. I found myself re-organizing projects in a few different ways to make project navigation easier. In this blog post I share a few different approaches as well as some useful tooling to improve my daily workflow.

NuGet is a great component distribution mechanism and it's awesome for consuming components and getting them into projects. However, creating NuGet packages and getting the version dependencies worked out reliably has been a challenge. Specifically the way dependency versions are pulled in by NuGet are somewhat counterintuitive. In this post I look at some of the issues and bring up some thoughts of how this could work better.

In ASP.NET MVC the RequireHttps attribute allows for securing controllers and controller methods, but it's limited to either on or off statically. In this post I discuss a custom attribute that can dynamically set SSL usage based on a configuration setting or delegate.